The Supreme Court spent much of Tuesday morning beating up Andrew Grossman, a lawyer asking the justices to revive a long-defunct limit on Congress’s ability to levy taxes.
The case Grossman was arguing, Moore v. United States, is widely viewed as a preemptive strike on wealth taxes — that is, taxes that target the stockpiled wealth of very rich people and that don’t simply tax the income rich people earn off of their wealth.
During her 2020 presidential campaign, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) proposed a 2 percent wealth tax on Americans worth over $50 million, but neither Warren’s proposed tax nor anything similar has ever become law, and there’s no chance that it will become law so long as Republicans control at least one house of Congress.
In any event, most of the justices appeared extraordinarily skeptical of Grossman’s arguments, and of the idea that the Court should revive a long-discredited limit on the federal government’s taxing power which the Court briefly embraced during its Lochner Era — an age where the justices regularly signed onto dubious legal arguments that protected capital from taxes and from workplace regulation.
Only Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch appeared to have any sympathy at all for Grossman’s attacks on Congress’s power to tax investors. And, while both men threw a barrage of hostile questions at Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, Alito and Gorsuch’s colleagues seemed uninterested in humoring them.
At one point, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Republican, interrupted Alito to ask Prelogar a softball question — a clear sign that Kavanaugh was unpersuaded by Alito’s arguments. At another point, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, another Republican appointee, cut off a similar line of questions by Gorsuch.
All of this said, the Court did spend a considerable amount of time while Prelogar was arguing the government’s case hunting around for a way to decide the Moore case narrowly. It is possible that the…
Read the full article here
